Beyond Discourse? Using Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis to explore affective assemblages, heterosexually striated space, and lines of flight online and at school

Abstract

This paper explores how Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical concepts extend and elaborate discursive and psychoanalytic interpretations of qualitative research findings. Analyzing data from a UK research project exploring young people's engagements with Social Networking Sites (SNSs), Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalytic method is drawn upon to consider complex desire‐flows in the social. In particular the notion of ‘affective assemblages’ is developed to explore the relationships between school and online spaces and subjective interfacing with these spaces. The paper suggests online space is heterosexually striated and SNSs create new intensified gendered and sexualized identities and affective relations between young people. Investigating the case study of a teen girl, Louise, who is socially rejected through the affective assemblage of the SNS, then pathologized at school for violently retaliating against being called a ‘fat slag’ online, the paper suggests a Deleuzoguattarian analysis offers new theoretical tools for thinking about discursive subjectification but also for mapping complex desire‐flows and micro movements through and against discursive/symbolic norms.